Pet litter is commonly used to absorb urine and faecal matter from cats. Clumping litter is said to be the most effective and popular of the types of pet litter available. Clumping litter solidifies wet excrement and deodorizes solid waste matter. The remains of the excrement can be removed from the container with a scoop.
Devices to contain and dispense pet litter are extensively known in the art, and are often referred to as litter trays. Liners are often used inside litter trays to prevent the tray from having direct contact with the litter and cat faecal matter.
Some litter trays do not have protection from cat urine around the perimeter, therefore when emptying the tray the user must wear gloves before handling the tray to avoid contact with the cat urine.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,329,879 discloses a litter box with high sidewalls and a ramp leading to an enclosed litter tray. This arrangement does not address the problem of disposing of the soiled litter.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,168,834 and 5,577,462 disclose a two tray system to allow used litter to be separated and disposed of U.S. Pat. No. 6,095,088 discloses a rotatable sieve system. Many of the litter trays that automatically sift through pet litter are expensive and not considered to be cost effective.
When cats exit some existing litter trays they often carry litter and faecal matter on their paws and transport it to areas outside the tray.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,386,143 and 6,983,720 disclose cleaning ramps for cleaning a cats paws as it leaves the litter box.
After sifting through litter with a scoop, there is no specific place to store the contaminated scoop. U.S. Pat. No. 6,976,661 discloses a scoop holder for dealing with this problem.
To date no litter tray has been able to deal with all these problems in one single cost effective device.
It is an objective of this invention to provide an assembly for storing cat litter, which minimises the prior art limitations and provides a cost effective means of dealing with cat litter.